Hi all, I’ve decided – with lots of thought and deliberation – to take a “tinkering” break (sabbatical?) over the next little while: grok some cool new software areas and hang out with the family. I’ll hopefully be taking a look at stuff like machine learning, natural language processing and more programming language goodness. You can follow the ramblings at my…

Joe Duffy and I recently did an MSDN TV stint on Method Dispatch Internals. Joe concentrated on the static end of the spectrum, while I talked about late-bound binding and dynamic calling convention. I also appeared with fellow Australian Microsofties at the recent Whidbey Ship party. Lots of fun!

Joe Duffy and I were really impressed with the amount of people who showed up for the PDC session “Write a Dynamic Language compiler in an hour” at the PDC last month. It confirmed my belief that customers care for details about compiler technologies and the managed libraries that enable them. We promised source download…

There seems to be a fair amount of recent press and blog action surrounding the dynamic or “scripting” language movement, especially when the context includes virtual machines. While I wont bother commenting on why this is the case, I figured I would cook up a few rough notes (and I do stress that these are…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted – we’ve been busy getting Beta 2 ready, and that means fixing bugs, bugs, and more bugs. I have a bunch of nearly complete posts, mostly around Reflection and type system identity, which I’ll be kicking out soon I hope. Lately, I’ve received a few questions around code…

Firstly, the big metadata diagram. Thanks to Chris King for this absolute gem. Now, on to the various ways developers can read and write metadata bits… Unmanaged Metadata Reader API’s I mentioned various times before that there exists Unmanaged Metadata reader/writer APIs that you can use to traverse and write out metadata structures with. It’s…

2 months since my last post? – Yeah I know, I’ve been very busy lately with Whidbey CLR commitments. I’ll have two posts today – a quick postmortem on TechEd AU/NZ, and a post on various metadata related API’s developers are able to consume. They’re kind of related… trust me. AU/NZ TechEd 2004: I…

Over the past couple of months, I’ve written up a bunch of notes surrounding the CLR type system. You’ll notice that it’s littered with “This is how Reflection deals with these types“, as it’s ment to be the start of a document that illustrates Reflection>Type system interactions. As always, it’s just a brain dump, and you can…

Looks like I’ll be taking the long flight down to Auckland, NZ and Canberra Australia to speak at TechEd 2004 under the developer tools banner. This week, I’ll start the speaking preperations – I suspect it will take me around three weeks to perfect the two talks I’ll be delivering (both CLR centric). I find all of this…

Figured I’d take the opportunity to capitalize on the increased link traffic Brad sent my way, by giving a quick and dirty overview of “What’s new in Reflection”. Illustrated are features I believe are worth their weight in gold – it’s a subset of the overall change list. I wrote some of this a little…